Book Review: The Impossibility of Perfection

Image Gallery

In this collection of essays, J.C. Hallman sets off on a quest for utopia that takes him to such divergent places as a ship that continuously circumnavigates the globe and a community of gun owners. He begins with the Pleistocene Rewilders, a group of scientists who believe that reintroducing the lost megafauna of North America would be good for the continent’s ecosystem. It is, he writes, “an impossibly positive action that stood in stark contrast to the dastardly suburban sales pitch” he’d grown up with.

Hallman shows us through the canon of utopian literature that there is no idea of perfection today—from a floating city to peaceful living through the threat of violence—that has not been written about or tried before. And though there are times he thinks he may have found it, in the end Hallman concludes that it is the very idea of utopia that is important, even when it doesn’t work in practice. “The failure of good intentions should not be met with inaction, but with further good intentions, with better intentions,” because, Hallman writes, the “truth was, dystopia came first—it was civilization.”